Last week in Multiply is the new email - Part One, I wrote about Om Malik's article entitled File Sharing is the new email and explained why I believe that Multiply is a better solution than email for sharing media such as photos and video. But since email is primarily about communication, for something to be considered "the next email" it has to be more than just good for sharing files. It really must succeed at communication outside the context of sharing, which Multiply does.

Here's a table which represents who you can send a message to on various platforms:

	Email	Multiply	Other Networks
Send to individuals	Yes	Yes	Yes
Send to multiple contacts	Yes	Yes	No
Send to whole network	No	Yes	No

With email, Multiply, and most social networking sites you can send a message and have a discussion with just one individual. But what about sending one message to a group of your contacts at the same time? With most email clients you can configure groupings and fire off a message to a group of email addresses. Multiply offers this functionality as well. More powerfully though, Multiply also offers what I'll call here virtual groups based on your relationships. Whenever you create a connection with someone you specify the relationship (cousin, sister, coworker, friend, fraternity brother, etc.). Based on these, you can easily choose to send a message to your "friends", "family", or "professional contacts". When a new relationship is created a user doesn't need to explicitly add an email address to a configured group. It's managed for you.

Only Multiply, however, allows you to communicate with your network. Other social networking sites may let you contact an individual within your network, but with Multiply you can send a message your whole network at once. The magic of this benefit was discussed in Part One under Audience. Not only is Multiply better for sharing photos than email, in many ways it's more powerful for simply communicating.

Of course, Multiply isn't necessarily suited for all types of communication. We're not about professional correspondence. Our active users still use email to communicate with their professional contacts on professional matters. Likewise, not everybody in the world is on Multiply (or a compatible system) ... yet. But if you look at the table above and the the table which compared Multiply to other sharing solutions, you can see why many of our users, myself included, are abandoning email for their social correspondence and media sharing. If you've got friends and family on Multiply, there's no reason to use email for corresponding with those people.

According to Mr. Malik, the P2P application Pando "lets users drag and drop files into a "package" which they can then email to friends." How can you consider an application that depends on email, "the new email"? I believe the behavioral transition from email to Multiply that many Multiply users are experiencing makes Multiply more worthy of such a designation.

Om Malik recently wrote an article entitled File Sharing is the new email in which he compared the latest breed of peer-2-peer applications for sharing files. While I understand the need for a bold, attention grabbing headline, I figured, especially since I haven't written in a while, I'd point out why these applications are not a replacement for e-mail nor necessarily the best way for the average user to share files.

For starters, let's examine the ways the article above discusses for sharing, as well as Multiply.

	Email	Flickr/YouTube	Shutterfly/Kodak	P2P Apps	Multiply
Barrier to entry	None	Sign-up	Sign-up	Download, Setup, Configure	Sign-up
Audience	Your Contacts	"The World"	Your Contacts	Your Contacts	Your *Real* Network
How to Share	Select, Upload	Select, Upload	Select, Upload	Select, Many behind the scenes uploads	Select, Upload
Communication	Disjointed / Fleeting	Comments	Comments	Disjointed / Fleeting	Discussions

Barrier to Entry: Perhaps email's last advantage is everyone has it. Anyone can send an email with 10MB of attachments, and chances are, regardless of how disgruntled the recipient is, they'll open the attachments and see the pictures. The web-based solutions generally require a simple registration. But the P2P apps require both parties to download and install applications. People may download a required application such as a web browser. But with all the alternative solutions for sharing files, good luck getting mass adoption with this relatively high barrier-to-entry.

Audience: As Mr. Malik wrote in his article "There are websites like Flickr and YouTube, of course, where users can post photos and video -- but those are designed for material you want to share with the world, not just a few friends or family members." The other solutions are limited to sharing with those whose email address you posses.

Only Multiply lets you share with your real social network. By real I mean people you are truly connected to in the real-world as opposed to on a site like MySpace where your network has 70 million people in it because every user is connected to Tom. Lots of people over the age of, say 25, may ask, "Why do I want to share with my network... people I don't know?" First of all, there are tons of people you do know that you simply don't have their email address. Do you posses the email address of every one of your college friends that you simply lost touch with? What about every cousin?

Second, there are a ton of people you don't know that really, really care about your stuff. Some of my favorite examples involve my mom. I'm the proud father of a 7 month-old son which makes my mom the typical proud grandmother who loves showing off her grandson. With Multiply my mom's friends (that I don't know) get to see my pictures of my son despite the fact that I don't have their email addresses. Another example is that when my friend from kindergarten (through today) G.J. posts pictures of his family, my mom who witnessed G.J. growing up too and would love to see these pictures, gets to. It's awesome and this magic is unavailable anywhere else. (Of course, you don't have to share everything with your network; you can share with just contacts or individuals for more privacy.)

How to Share: Most of the solutions involve selecting photos and uploading them. The upload step is a little more transparent with email, but whether waiting a few minutes for photos to upload to a web-site, or for an email to go out, it's the same thing. With the P2P solutions you still have to select the photos to share. The big advantage of the P2P solutions is that you don't have to upload something...but this advantage diminishes as bandwidth speeds increases, and for the most part people generally don't need to share full high-resolution files. (Update- it was pointed out to me that even with P2P, files are still uploaded from the owner's PC. It happens behind the scenes but everytime time someone else wants to see the files which could tie up bandwidth at an inconvenient time for the sharer.)

Communication: All the applications discussed involve some mechanism for notifying the people you want to share with that new files are available (with only Multiply allowing you to go beyond your contact list). With email this initial notification step is inherent, and the P2P applications reviewed by Mr. Malik are building their sharing tools around email or IM-like processes. The problem is that any communication that results from email or IM-like solutions is disjointed and fleeting. For starters, it is separate from the photos. Getting a reply like "You look great in this shot" is meaningless without the shot....especially as time progresses and the initial email with the photos was deleted. Secondarily, if you send pictures to a dozen people via email, some will "reply-to-all" and some just to you. Some that reply will quote the original message, and some won't. A few people. A few replies. A big mess.

The other web-based solutions do allow people to add comments to photos, but nobody (other than perhaps the owner of the photos) gets notified. This hinders communication. If I post pictures from a party for my friends on Shutterfly and my friend Dave replies today "That party was a blast" and tomorrow my friend Peter replies "Dave, what were you thinking with that outfit?" nobody will know what Dave was thinking because Dave has no way of knowing a new comment was added. Is he supposed to constantly go back and check every album or video he ever looked at?

Multiply's message board not only notifies people when content is added, it notifies people when replies are added as well. This creates discussions as opposed to a handful of comments. And since these discussions can involve your whole social network and not just a few contacts, they are more interesting and exciting. More people that care about me as well as care about Peter and Dave - their friends and family that wouldn't be aware of my pictures on another site - can take part.

Thus far, I've focused on why Multiply is better than email for sharing photos and videos. But since email, like Multiply, is primarily about communication, for something to be considered "the next email" it should really succeed at communication outside the context of sharing. That'll be the focus of Part Two.

Here's a great article/blog entry about Multiply. Hope you enjoy:

Rediscovering connectivity through Multiply

There's been some press lately on new services that are focused on using blogs for classified listings. One of these products is Edgeio, which according to a recent BusinessWeek online blog

The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word "listing" (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the "listing" tag and index them on Edgeio.com.

Conceptually, Edgeio sounds complementary to a couple of competing standards for embedding content in a blog...Microformats and Structured Blogging. For a decent overview on these check out Stowe Boyd's entry Microformats v Structured Blogging: A Small War Big Consequences.

I find this topic interesting for a couple reasons. For starters, Multiply integrated classified listing templates in a blogging application over two years ago. Perhaps more interesting though is that Multiply recently removed the technology! Why? Because Multiply is about your social network, and by social network I don't mean the fake add-everybody-as-a-contact-whether-you-know-them-or-not networks prevalent elsewhere. We aggressively try to recreate a realistic approximation of people's real-world networks because we use one's network much as an e-mail program uses one's contact list.

As part of that goal, unlike every other networking or media sharing site, we do not provide any system-wide global views. On Flickr, for example, you can see an aggregation of every Flickr users' tags...but you can't see an aggregation of just your contacts' or your social network's tags. Ditto their photos. When you do a profile search on sites like MySpace you are searching the whole multi-million user database. Profile searches on Multiply are limited to people you are legitimately connected to. Likewise, our old "marketplace" only showed listings added by people in your network, not every Multiply user.

But to build a successful market you need two key ingredients. 1) Lots of buyers. 2) Lots of sellers. The more buyers and more sellers the better the market. We could've made our marketplace better by adding an "everyone" view but felt it was more important to be true to what we're about- communicating with a trusted group- not providing exposure to absolute strangers. You can use the rest of the internet for that. So since we recognized that this conflict was preventing us from building the best marketplace, we simply removed some of those features to focus on areas where we can be the best.

I would point out that while Multiply's model didn't make for the best marketplace repository, Multiply was extremely effective as a notification mechanism. Better than e-mail, our proprietary multi-messaging allowed somebody to notify their whole social network that they were selling something...and it still does. People are still selling or requesting "wanted" items via generic posts or blog entries with as much effectiveness as when we had the market template and centralized repository. They can also tag their entries "listing" and look through those items.

So that's Multiply. What about these other technologies and the companies hoping to capitalize on them? I have a few doubts and they all come down to the two ingredients. Buyers and sellers. Let's start with the sellers. Who are they? I'd say the vast majority of people posting items on CraigsList and eBay probably don't have blogs, it will be a while until they do, and assuming they do are they going to be so web2.0 savvy to not just think of posting on their blog, but encoding it properly with whatever tagging mechanism becomes the standard? I believe the only sellers initially are going to be not just the early adopters, but a subset of that group that buys into the concept. Is that enough to sustain the model to the point of critical mass?

Let's make some assumptions and assume that enough people blog listings to support a market. If so, where will the buyers go to? To Edgeio? Why? If encoding blogs takes off it is going to be based on open standards. If there are millions of blog entries properly encoded with "for sale" listings, there will be plenty of Edgeio competitors aggregating those listings and trying to present them uniquely. What is going to make one better than other at this task, which on the surface, doesn't seem like much more than a subset of Feedster or Technorati which are already aggregating blogs?

More importantly though is that one blog-classified aggregator doesn't just have to be better than another, it has to be better than CraigsList or eBay, and there's a huge obvious challenge to that happening. There would be nothing stopping CraigsList from aggregating the blog listings themselves. Items added on CraigsList + blog classifieds will always be greater than just blog classifieds and hence a better marketplace.

The bottom-line is that whether on a site like Feedster or Craigslist, functionality related to shopping blog classifieds will at most be just a piece of a business, and not necessarily a business itself. Of course this is consistent with Web 2.0. If Web 1.0 was about attracting enough audience so you can IPO, then Web 2.0 is about attracting the right audience so you can sell your feature. I'll elaborate more on this in a future post.

A few months ago I wrote a couple of journal entries (Social Networking is Not Broken and Fixing Social Networking) in which I stated that the phrase “social networking” is terribly vague as it can represent a ton of different things. However, as nebulous a term as that is, it is just a subset of an even more nebulous expression…”social software”.

According to Wikipedia, social software lets people rendezvous, connect or collaborate through a computer network or networks. Gee, that limits things. The wikipedia entry then lists some examples of social software including wikis, blogs, internet forums, social bookmarking, social networks, instant messaging, and even multiplayer online games.   

Too often software is considered social not because it encourages socialization, as per the broad definition above, but rather because it serves as a platform for sociology. To elaborate, compare match.com -  a dating site where people rendezvous in an effort to connect in the most social of ways - to a site like del.icio.us, which lets people tag, share, and browse bookmarks publicly. By aggregating links via tags, del.icio.us does provide interesting insight into what society is thinking. But the only socializing with del.icio.us is among those that study social trends and social software.  If del.icio.us is considered social software then so should Excel and MySQL because they, likewise, are just tools for storing, reporting, and analyzing data.  

Despite the fact that a dating site encourages socialization more than a social bookmarking site, dating sites are not listed as examples of social software on the wikipedia entry. The list of examples more puzzlingly doesn’t include the granddaddy of social software, e-mail.  More people probably rendezvous, connect or collaborate via plain old e-mail than all the other examples of social software combined. The reason that e-mail and dating sites aren’t listed is not because they don’t encourage socializing, but rather they are simply not en vogue with those that study social behavior or write about social software. E-mail communication is, for the most part, private. There’s no place for someone to log in and see what hot topics people are e-mailing each other about today. A site like del.icio.us lets anyone login and see what a million strangers are bookmarking. Unlike e-mail, del.icio.us provides great fodder for Many 2 Many: A group weblog on social software or the social software weblog and the ability for software to provide this fodder is seemingly a more important consideration than the ability to facilitate socialization.  

In the article The Road Ahead in the10/24 issue of Time Magazine, Esther Dyson, the editor of the Release 1.0 newsletter for CNET Networks, was quoted as saying sharing photos on Flickr has brought her family closer. Flickr, like del.icio.us, lets you check out what strangers are doing (in Flickr’s case, you can see what photos they are sharing). It’s a little exhibitionist, a little voyeuristic, but most importantly sociological. The ability to see popular tags at a global level provides great fodder and, indirectly, provides a platform for the development of interesting analytical tools… thus providing more fodder for the social software bloggers and other sociologists. Those valuable merits, however, do not mean it is the best photo sharing tool in terms of bringing your family closer.  

At Multiply, our goal was not to design an application that provides data for sociologists to analyze; it was to encourage socialization among your family and friends. Our proprietary convergence of content-sharing tools with a true message board encourages ongoing discussion, not just a random comment or two, but real conversations…socializing in the truest sense of the word. Likewise the social networking component allows me, for example, to mutually share photos with my mom’s cousins and my wife’s distant relatives….family I previously didn’t keep in touch with or even know. Multiply brings families closer in ways no other site can approach.    

If you had a half hour of extra leisure time and were given the choice to look through new photos taken by friends and family or new photos taken by strangers, which would you pick?  The former is the more social response.  Sites like Flickr and del.icio.us are great for analyzing what a million strangers are up to. That’s just sociology.

A few days ago I received my October 4, 2005 edition of PC Magazine in the mail.  On the cover at the absolute top was the caption “BEST PHOTO-SHARING WEB SITES”. Upon reading that on the cover I was immediately pissed off because I assumed Multiply wasn't covered. If this was a year ago I would’ve wondered anxiously, “Did they review Multiply?”.  But I know better now. I quickly flipped to the article and started reading the preamble which included “For this roundup, we judged sites by how well they let you share photos and by how many extras they offer.”  Interesting. My anger dissipated and I thought, “hmm, maybe they did cover Multiply.” I then scanned the sites reviewed…twice…could not find Multiply… and got upset again.

When reading the cursory reviews of the sites I determined that Multiply compared favorably in terms of our photo sharing features to all the sites mentioned. As far as “extras they offer” though, Multiply in my not so humble opinion blows everyone else away. Some examples:

1.    Of the ten sites reviewed only one allows uploading of video in addition to photos. (Considering that the same digital cameras that take pictures also shoot video I am surprised this wasn't a more important criteria.)
2.    Only two allow categorization by tagging (and neither of these are the one that offers video, and one of these doesn’t offer photo printing).
3.    Only one has integrated blogging tools (and it isn’t one of the three above).
4.    None allow you to share music or links.
5.    None allow you to share with your social network.
6.    Most importantly, none provide the integration of photo sharing with a social-network driven message board that facilitates turning photo albums into conversations, which is really what sharing is all about.

So, considering the above I can only think of three reasons why Multiply wasn’t considered for this round-up. First, maybe PC Magazine simply never heard of Multiply, or second, they don’t consider us a photo sharing site. But in the January 14 issue of PC Magazine, it was written in a review of Multiply that Multiply affords you a type of social interaction that you can't get with typical blogging or photo-sharing services.  Clearly they’ve heard of us, and that quote also implies that they consider us a photo-sharing service.

My assumption then is reason #3, PC Magazine doesn’t appreciate the degree to which we’ve executed on building a truly convergent product. Since we’re not just a photo-sharing site, we’re not up for consideration as one of the best photo-sharing sites despite the items enumerated above.

The lack of appreciation for convergence isn’t just limited to PC Magazine. Just take a look at the blogging and press coverage of Flickr and Del.icio.us, two darlings of the Technorati crowd. For the most part, Flickr just lets you tag photos and look through strangers’ photos, and, Del.icio.us just lets you tag links and look through strangers’ links. Both sites can be considered inventive, but also extremely simple. So simple in fact, that one of our developers burped, and now you can tag your content on Multiply. If you’re a Multiply user and not familiar with tagging check out this overview on how to use them.

It seems that because Multiply lets you tag your photos, video, blog entries, music, and links, we’re guaranteeing ourself less coverage than a site whose sole existence is letting you tag one type of content. That’s a shame because convergence is something that users really appreciate. In some of our users’ words rather than mine:

I much prefer Multiply because I have my own website, journal, photos, etc. all in one. I don't need to login to a billion other websites to check each of these.

I wouldn't use anything other than Multiply because the technologies would be spread across multiple web-sites and that's a lot more hassle.

I had searched endlessly for a site that offered photo albums, journals etc. over a period of months and found nothing comparable.

I like how Multiply puts them together in one. It's convenient not to have to sign in to multiple sites.

I have not seen anything as comprehensive as this before.

Nothing compares to Multiply because everything is in one place.

I don't like having to log into a separate site for every single thing I want to do. It's much easier to have things in one place, and of the "one stop" sites out there, Multiply is the best implemented.

If you were to ask any of these users what the best photo-sharing web site is, they would say Multiply because of its convergence, the same convergence that excludes us from being considered one of the best photo-sharing web sites by PC Magazine. This is what I refer to as the convergence disconnect and the cause of this disconnect can be described in one word: convenience.

Consumers like convergent products because they provide convenience. Take my Treo 600 for example. Is the phone as small and sleek and comfortable in my pocket as the tiniest cell-phones out there? No. Is it as easy to move MP3s from my computer to the Treo as it is to a dedicated MP3 player? No. Does the convenience of being able to carry my cell phone, PDA, a couple hours of tunes, and a web-browser in one device make up for the sacrifices? Yes, many times over. It's the same thing with Multiply. As per the quotes above, consumers like being able to log into one site, not many, because it is much more convenient.

Convergence is not convenient, however, for journalists that cover technology. The number of sites that have photo sharing in some capacity is probably ten times that of those that do nothing but photo sharing. It's more convenient to focus on the severely limited group. Limiting the scope is an easy way to limit the amount of time spent researching and reviewing sites, thus in turn increasing profit. The decision may be good business, but I also believe it does a disservice by not informing readers of their best options.  

I recently wrote that there are two distinct types of bloggers: professional bloggers and personal bloggers.  By professional I don’t necessarily mean paid-to-write, as most are not (unless you count what is probably a few pennies per month via Adsense). Rather, just that there is some professional motivation behind their writing. I also suggested that a good way to look at the difference between these two groups is that professional blogging is more like publishing, while personal blogging is more about communicating.

Pretend for a moment that you are going to publish a magazine. One of the first steps would be to decide what your magazine is about. This decision is key because it determines not just what kind of articles may be included in the magazine, but it also defines the audience. Speaking of which, you’d then need to worry about building up that audience. These same publishing concerns apply to professional bloggers who must also limit their posts to the theme of their blog, or risk losing the readership they are trying to build.

But are the millions of people that are posting their random thoughts on their personal blogs worried about keeping their blog entries on topic? Of course not, otherwise they wouldn't be random. Similarly, are the personal bloggers that are posting these random things worried about how many people are reading their blog? Not really. But they are concerned, more specifically, with who is reading their blog. They want people they know to read what they’re writing. Therefore, if personal bloggers aren’t constrained by a topic nor care about building an audience, is it accurate to call their blogging endeavors publishing?

In my opinion, this type of blogging is more similar to communicating via e-mail than it is to publishing. In the mid to late 1990s most electronic communication was done via e-mail. When you needed to send a message to somebody, or a few people, or everyone you knew (or whose e-mail you had) you fired off an e-mail. When instant messaging came about,  informal one-to-one messages that required instant feedback moved from e-mail to IM (or from the telephone to IM). Similarly, a personal blog can be a better way to deliver a non-critical, no-response-required message to a large group of people than e-mail. It’s about communication.

I believe the two different types of blogging will have two different futures. I'm excluding the corporate-sponsored professional blogs, which will always have a place as a company's “Industry News” or “Company News” page.  I think professional blogging will eventually subside and fade away as have other publishing fads. When was the last time you heard the word “e-zine”, for example?

 As renowned Letters from the Front author John Pezaris puts it, the ease of publishing leads to "more and more drivel published, and the fraction that’s actually any good becomes vanishingly small”.   It’s not that every professional blog is drivel but it is getting to the point where, even if you’re a hip tagging/RSS/trackback jockey, you still can’t find the good stuff. I’ve almost given up and find myself increasingly turning to - make that going back to - traditional sources like CNET, Wired, PC Magazine, and AP Tech, where I know the journalists have earned some credibility and there are at least some editorial standards.

The fact that there is so much professional blogging going on, with much of it drivel, is increasingly leading to backlash. Ironically, much of this backlash against blogging takes place on blogs. One example is this entry itself. For another example, Maddox calls bloggers narcissistic on his own blog. Ultimately, I believe aspiring writers or journalists looking to get noticed will be better off taking a step backward in the web-publishing evolution by putting their musings on a web-page that doesn’t look like, nor is called, a blog. The same words by what appears to be a real journalist writing for some e-zine will be interpreted more positively than if by yet another blogger on yet another blog.

When I was 10 or 11 years old my parents encouraged me to write in a diary, or in masculine terminology, a journal. At the time I was perhaps too immature to appreciate the therapeutic or retrospective benefits of keeping a personal private journal. But I do recall questioning, at a mere 10 or 11 years old, why should I waste time writing stuff that nobody else is reading? Personal bloggers often come to the same conclusion which is why personal blogging will evolve from its perception of being a personal publishing technology to that of being a social communications technology.

Blogging solutions that simply allow people to publish in a vacuum will continue to be abandoned by its users that actually want not just an audience, but an interactive one. And if I may say so, that’s why I love Multiply’s ‘brilliant-mentation’ of blogging. (Hey, if Judith Meskill can coin “simple-mentation”, I can coin “brilliant-mentation”.) By integrating blogging with social-network based communication tools, Multiply not only provides people an audience, but also the means to communicate with that audience.

There are a few other sites trying to integrate blogs with social networking, but they are severely inefficient as communications tools which makes them equally inefficient for personal blogging. Since Multiply is the only site that alerts everyone in the blogger’s social network not just when a new entry is posted, but when anyone replies to a discussion about the entry, I’m comfortable stating that the future of personal blogging is here.

We often talk around the office about all the bloggers that blog about blogging.  Now I’m one of them. One of the things we ponder is if blogging didn’t exist, what would bloggers that blog about blogging blog about? That’s a rhetorical question because, logically speaking, the answer is nothing. This entry that you’re reading wouldn’t exist.

For another example, if blogging didn’t exist Judith Meskill wouldn’t have written that she wasn't enamoured of another site's  ‘simple-mentation of the blog’”.

Huh?  Isn’t blogging the epitome of a ‘simple-mentation’?

Blogging has become such a surprisingly popular phenomena because it’s pretty much the simplest way to publish on the web. Sure, I’m a geek, so back in 1995 I didn’t find composing HTML in Notepad and ftp’ing files to a server too complex. Then in 1996 I tried some of the simpler WYSIWYG editors, which made composing even easier. By 1997 I knew enough Perl to display an empty text form field, save the text entered in that form, and spit out an HTML page. This is the core of a simple message board, which is all a blog is…a simple message board where only one person can start threads. Then came sites like GeoCities, which made it even simpler to publish on the web.

Bill Machrone recently wrote in PC Magazine that “a surprising number of people don’t realize that blogging software is a content management system”. Exactly- a ridiculously simple one. 

The ‘simple-mentation’ comment brings to light perhaps my biggest pet peeve of journalists' coverage of blogging - and that’s the lack of recognition that there are two distinct types of bloggers: professional, and personal. 

By professional I do not mean written by a professional writer. Far from that. I simply mean there is some professional motivation behind the blogging. Perhaps the writer is an aspiring journalist and wants to get noticed, or the blogger is a celebrity looking to improve their image or increase their visibility, a la Ariana Huffington's Huffington Post. Or maybe the blog is sponsored by a company in an effort to increase its awareness. My favorite of these is RepriseMedia’s  Searchviews. Not only is Erin Bradley, the blog’s primary contributor, extremely prolific, but her writing style is entertaining and down-to-earth and lacks even the slightest trace of self-absorption prevalent on most non-personal blogs.

Then there are, what I believe to be the overwhelming majority, the personal bloggers. These are people just blogging about their daily lives and their random thoughts. The millions of people blogging on sites like LiveJournal and Blogger and Multiply aren’t doing so with some professional agenda in mind. Yet despite the majority of blogging falling into this personal realm, just about all media coverage centers on professional blogging.

The needs of these two types of bloggers are completely distinct. The professional blog is generally limited to a specific topic:  politics, a type of software, a specific industry, etc. The target audience, hence, is anybody interested in the topic. Increasing the size of this target audience is a goal of the blogger. This led to features like Scratchback…err…Trackback - the blogging equivalent of bartering banner ads - and RSS. Also included in this list, as Machrone pointed out, are features to manage advertising. 

Personal blogs aren’t really about a specific topic unless you consider the random thoughts and activities of the author of the blog a topic. The target audience, similar to the professional blogs, includes people who care about the topic – but in this case it generally means people who care about the blogger him/herself. When some kid is complaining about her parents in a blog, or when parents are writing about their kids, Trackback isn’t needed. The author isn’t hoping somebody else quotes them. Multiply has close to 1 million users and I don’t recall a single request for Trackback. Likewise RSS, which most internet users are unfamiliar with according to Pew Internet. (Note, Multiply does provide RSS feeds.)

I assume it’s the lack of these features -  needed for professional blogging but not  personal blogging -  that Meskill refers to as ‘simple-mentation’.  It would be great, though, if bloggers that blog about blogging recognized that excluding superfluous features  isn’t simple-mentation… it’s better design. Additional features can lead to complexity, bloat, more trouble-shooting and quality assurance efforts, and ultimately slow user-growth. AOL prospered in the late 1990s by simplifying the Internet. Apple’s iPod is tremendously successful because it simplified the MP3 player. A user writes that keeping things simple "means that Multiply is easier to use for everyone, which aids to the accessibility for everyone". Most people want ‘simple-mentation’.

Back to the two types of bloggers, another way to look at the difference is that professional blogging is more akin to publishing, while personal blogging is more about communicating. If you think that sounds like a segue into discussing why Multiply’s social communications tools are ideal for personal blogging, you are correct.  I’ll elaborate though in a future post since that’s another topic.

In my previous journal entry I wrote that Social Networking is Not Broken but, rather, it is the perception of social networking that needs fixing. Too often, the knee-jerk reaction is to classify any site that leverages one’s social network as a YASN (“yet another social network”) -  a short-sighted generalization that unfairly casts a negative stigma on sites that may  be unique and useful.  

Who, though, is to blame for this negative stigma? Here are a few candidates:  

Friendster. They are probably the most well-known “social networking” site. Molly Wood writes “My big beef with Friendster was always, 'Well, what would I do there?'". What you can do is see how big you can grow your network by adding contacts. And since one has a limited pool of real-world contacts it quickly became not just acceptable, but common-place to add strangers as contacts on Friendster.  

Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. When this VC firm decided to fund the severance packages of high-profile Friendster execs it gave Friendster’s breed of social networking legitimacy. Hundreds of journalists started covering “social networking”, and hundreds of thousands signed up for Friendster and asked themselves the same question Molly Wood asked.  

Orkut. Under the guise of wanting to ramp up slowly, Orkut launched as an invite-only site. Soon blogs writing about Orkut weren’t complete without a handful of invitation requests in the replies. Orkut made it fashionable to add strangers as contacts as way to get into the service. Networks were artificial from day one.  

Tom. You know Tom. Everybody knows Tom. He’s the most popular person on the planet.  If you sign-up for Myspace he’s your friend that connects you to every other user on Myspace, including dozens of porn stars. If part of the fun of Friendster was seeing how big of a network you could get, Myspace upped the ante by giving people a humongous network to start (and perhaps a more interesting one because it contains porn stars).  

It’s unfair, though, to put all the blame  for social networking’s negative stigma on those mentioned above. They are all simply trying to make a buck. Good for them. The real culprits are the journalists and bloggers who perpetuate the notion that all social networking services are alike. These are the people that made Friendster synonymous with “social networking” even though the application is still in question to this day. Most continue to label Myspace a "social network" even though every user on the site is linked to one common node. Some writers flocked to Orkut, loaded their contact lists with strangers, and then, ironically, complain that social networking doesn’t work.  

The press coverage of social networking often misses the boat on two important concepts: target market, and the actual application.  It’s not uncommon for somebody to casually write about “social networking” and refer to 3 or 4 web sites that have nothing in common.  

Recently Judith Meskill wrote that LinkedIn is one of the only SNS in which I continue to maintain a semi-active membership. The likely reason is that Ms. Meskill is part of LinkedIn's target market. Myspace, according to Molly Wood, “attracts 16 to 34-year-old hipsters.”  While I don't know Ms. Meskill's age, based on her writing style and my correspondence with her, I wouldn’t describe her as a “hipster” nor am I surprised she doesn’t use Myspace. And that is exactly what Myspace wants! If non-hipsters started using Myspace, then it wouldn’t be for hipsters and their trendy niche is shot.  

More important than the target market is the application itself. What does the service help its users do? What is the goal of the service?  Judith Meskill says she’s semi-active on LinkedIn. The reason, in my opinion, that she uses LinkedIn and not, say... Friendster, has nothing to do with which site is better at “social networking” but rather which site is better at providing what Ms. Meskill wants to do.  

So, if social networking is “broken”, how do you fix it? Easy. When my 1 MP digital camera broke I threw it away. It wasn’t worth fixing. Do the same with the phrase “social networking” as it pertains to an industry or space. “Social networking” is merely a technology. It’s a component. Let’s stop writing about it as an industry. Just like we don't lump together E-mail and Instant Messaging as "contact list" applications, we should stop referring to any site that takes advantage of what will soon be a ubiquitous way to manage contact lists as a “social networking site”.  

Don’t write articles that compare Friendster to LinkedIn to Multiply.  Write about what these sites are about and group them with their true competitors.  Friendster is about meeting new people socially. So compare Friendster to sites like Match.com. LinkedIn is about meeting new people in a professional context. So write about whether LinkedIn is better than Monster.com or other sites that help you meet new people in a professional context.  Multiply is about sharing digital media and social blogging. So don’t compare Multiply to Orkut or Friendster.  Compare Multiply to Flickr or Blogger.

In the article “Five reasons social networking doesn’t work” Molly Wood writes that Myspace will make “more than $20 million in ad sales this year”.  $20 million! That sounds like it does work! Just as inconsistent is her defining Myspace’s unique target audience yet still bashing all social networking sites as if they were the same. This article, which should be called “Five reasons that some social networking doesn’t work for me,” is indicative that what’s amiss is social networking coverage.  If journalists stopped referencing social networking as an industry unto itself, this article wouldn’t exist. Instead, we’d get some great pieces discussing how different applications, some tried-and-true like dating, and some cutting-edge like video-blogging, are leveraging this new technology in compelling ways.  

“Social networking is broken” has been a recent popular topic of conversation among journalists and bloggers.  Molly Wood of CNET lists Five Reasons Social Networking Doesn’t Work and Olga Kharif of BusinessWeek asks Is Social Networking Broken?”  No, social networking is not broken. What is broken is the perception of social networking.

The way I see it there are two possible broad definitions of what [on-line] “social networking” is.

1)  A site that facilitates networking, e.g. meeting new people. Long before Friendster and Orkut, there were dating sites like Match.com and Yahoo Personals which facilitated meeting new people. Ditto Hotjobs and Monster. One of my former projects, commissioner.com, would group 10 or 12 strangers together that wanted to play fantasy baseball into a fantasy league where they competed in that intimate group for six months and often became friends. My town runs a small web-site with a discussion group dedicated for newcomers to meet other newcomers and my wife and I have made new friends through this.   

Of course the above “social” applications that facilitate “networking” are not new and certainly they aren’t broken. Let’s try a different definition.

2)   A site that uses one’s social network. This requires a definition of “social network” and while I’m not sure there’s an official one, most are referring to the six-degrees-of-separation representation of people’s contacts. I have my contacts and they have theirs and everyone’s all linked together. The linking together of contact lists creates, well, some sort of super three-dimensional contact list which is all a social network really is.

So if social networking is simply utilizing a more powerful contact list, is contact listing broken? Contact listing? What is that? It is a concept that doesn’t get hyper-analyzed because a contact list is merely a component of an application. My cell-phone has a contact list. My IM client has a contact (buddy) list. I have a contact list in Outlook. I have a contact list at my web-based e-mail service. We’re all actually contact listing all over the place but nobody is talking about it…because the contact list is just one helpful element used by a bigger application.  

On June 13th, 2005 Stowe Boyd recently wrote in Social Networking: Broken, Boring, or Offtrack?:  

“When the social networking modeling and analysis becomes just one helpful element of the substrate that these next generation offerings will be built on, then we will see the true explosion in social networking use. In the meantime, leave me out.”  

“Next generation?”  Multiply was [admittedly self-] proclaiming to be next generation in March 2004, because we recognized then that the social network was merely an element of something bigger.   

Bernard Moon wrote on June 22, 2005 in No Social Networking Site is an Island that:  

"[Friendster] had become nothing more than a glorified phone book. The lesson? Tribe.net, Friendster, and dozens of other social networking services have proved that social networking functions alone don't make for a successful or compelling site."  

“Glorified phone book?” Perfectly stated, although we've been making that point for about a year and a half.  

Multiply was launched as a sharing site, not a “meeting new people” site. The social network was just an element to facilitate the exchange of blogs, photos, and other content.  The social network provides users a larger audience of people that may care about their blogs and photos as well as an efficient means to notify these people that new content is being shared.  Are Multiply users paying money to add more people to their address book? No. They are paying to share more photos and video.

But rather than write about us as “next generation” in 2004, many just assumed, because we used the words “social networking”, that we were a YASN (“yet another social network”). If there was ever a short-sighted generalization, that is it.  It's akin to saying "it's the same as all the rest" thus creating a preconceived notion among people that haven't yet had a chance to make a true objective analysis.

What is most detrimental though is when those preconceived notions have a negative stigma associated with them, and it is simply the negative stigma of social networking that is leading to all kinds of theories about why it is “broken”. Who, though, is to blame for social networking’s negative stigma?  That’ll be the topic of my next blog entry. Stay tuned. 

Barb Dybwad recently wrote a blog entry entitled Can I subscribe to your brain? about the “idea of being able to subscribe (ideally in one click or simple set of steps) to a feed that contains a person’s total output [snip] My reaction is three-fold: 1) Yes, I want to subscribe to people’s brains, please. 2) Yes, I want to provide my own “RSS brain” – one feed to rule them all. 3) This sounds an awful lot like a [Digital Lifestyle Aggregator].”

Guess what? It exists. It is called Multiply.  You want to subscribe to all my output in “one click”. You want to be able to see my blog, my photos, my video, stuff I’m selling, my restaurant reviews in “one click”. Here you go…  

http://michaelg.multiply.com  

(Yes, you can get all that’s there in RSS too, or e-mail alerts if you want.)  

You may argue that the above isn’t all my digital output. I may have stuff elsewhere. But this is all the stuff I want you to see. That’s a choice on the part of the producer, the content owner.  Wishing there were an easy way to aggregate a person’s content against that person’s wishes is irrational. It is akin to saying you wish you could see all the content that I have posted on Multiply for my family, despite not being considered family by me.  

You may also argue that for Multiply to be a Digital Lifestyle Aggregator it requires the person to put all their content on Multiply. Bingo. You need to look at the aggregator concept from both sides…not just the consumer side, but the producer side as well. In one of our user’s words:  

I could blog on LiveJournal or MySpace, try to sell the Mac any number of places, post reviews on Epinions, and put my calendar on .Mac. I don't like having to log into a separate site for every single thing I want to do. It's much easier to have things in one place, and of the "one stop" sites out there, Multiply is the best implemented and least prone to having problems.  

Why would any individual want to post photos on one site, blog on another, share video on a third, and so on, and so on, and maintain a dozen user ids and passwords, and learn a dozen different interfaces provided there was a solution that allowed them to do them all effectively in one place?   

Marc Canter writes in Mixing and Matching on one’s public page that “This is what we all need - every DLA, portal, social network and blogging tool around. The ultimate "About Me" page. Now that Tribe has set the new standard, all other systems will be compared to this.”  

Tribe maybe has set the standard for importing content from other places. But who is that targeting? Certainly not the mainstream audience that wants things simple and convenient.   Multiply is not just the only site that allows you to easily share video, music, photos, and blog in one place, but it’s the only site that integrates sharing with your social network so all the content gets looked at and discussed.  

By putting all the content in one place it encourages people to explore new media. An active photo sharer that has never blogged (and has no real interest in it) is not going to sign-up for a blogging site. Yet, they start blogging on Multiply.  Individuals that didn’t even know their digital cameras could take video, started uploading video when we introduced the feature since there was zero barrier to entry (no new password, no new web site to learn) for uploading video.  

Are there photo sharing sites that have some minor features Multiply doesn't have? Sure. Are there blogging sites that have some minor features Multiply doesn't have? Sure.

Does Multiply provide enough features for most people to easily “subscribe to people’s brains” and to easily provide your own feed to “rule them all?" Absolutely.  That, I believe, makes Multiply the standard.